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You've all seen the curious Nintendo Revolution controller, but what about the Revolution console itself? No official information has been released, and we don't really expect to see it soon, but it's Friday, so a little rumor-mongering is in order.

A Factor 5 employee who goes by the name "Han Solo" claims to know the Revolution's specs, and has leaked them (middle of page 3). Why listen to some guy trapped in 1977? Señor Solo, as I'm sure he's known to his Spanish-speaking friends, proved worth listening to when he nearly nailed the Xbox 360 stats before the official details came out. That said, we can't treat this as reliable information, but it may prove to be good fodder for a Friday evening console war. Or maybe, just maybe, Nintento and Sony fans will join hands and sing songs about the merits of a market with more than one player.

If you're the kind of person who hates rumors, then... why are you still reading? OK, with that out of the way, here we go.

The brains of the console are rumored to be a single dual-threaded IBM "custom" PowerPC 2.5 GHz CPU, with 256 KB L1 cache and 1 MB of L2 cache (L3 cache is rumored). The system will also sport a Physical Processing Chip (PPU) with 32MB of dedicated RAM, while the CPU itself will saddled up next to 512MB of system RAM. The custom ATI GPU solution is rumored to consist of a RN520 600MHz core, backed with 256MB of RAM and "32 parallel floating-point dynamically scheduled shader pipelines." While the output will theoretically be capable of putting out 1080p resolution (higher even, at 2048x1268), Solo says that HD support has not yet been decided (which fits with Nintendo's own comments).

I'm not particularly inclined to deeply assess how such a configuration would stack up to the Xbox 360 or the PS3, but Solo wrote that he thinks it "would be on par with Xbox360, though PS3 could have an edge in the CPU area. In the GPU area the Revolution beats PS3, and technically would match Xbox 360."

Nintendo may have the right idea. As publishers demand more and more games go cross-platform, a single-core system that's easy on developers may be the best way to ensure plenty of cross-platform support, without burning too much money on console architecture that may only be used for exclusive games. While we expect to see exclusive titles for both the Xbox 360 and the PS3, most titles will be cross-platform, and will not necessarily take advantage of the multi-core optimizations for the Xbox 360, or Sony's Cell architecture. Keep in mind that Gabe Newell recently said that the Xbox's CPU performs like a 1.7GHz P3 on unoptimized code.

Perhaps I was preparing myself for a letdown, or something truly abysmal, but these specs don't look too shabby to me. Of course, specs alone can't define how fun a console is or how developer-friendly the various tools will be. However, for a company that seems to really want to downplay polygon counts as a way to measure a console, these specs aren't exactly anything to apologize for.

Hannibal has a few things to say with regards to the assessment made by Solo, so stop by Carthage, part of our new Staff.Ars section, for additional comments later today.